Miranda July

A few months ago I saw Miranda July read at Modern Times, a modestly sized neighborhood bookstore in the Mission district. I arrived 15 minutes early and the place was already packed to the gills. Shortly after, Ms. July, looking very fashionable and only slightly awkward climbing a ladder in a skirt and heels, ascended to a platform running along the back wall of the store. She joked about this being her mother’s worst nightmare, watching her daughter climb a ladder in a skirt and heelsbefore a large audience. Then she played a game with the audience that involved finding words she had picked out from the books on the shelves around us and stringing them into a sentence. I’ve forgotten what the sentence was, but something incredibly clever and charming, I’m sure.

Miranda July is the epitome of incredibly clever and charming.

She is also, as a beautiful (if a bit cartoonish) and award-winning writer and director in her early thirties, an instigator of occasionally overwhelming envy in people like myself (undiscovered writers of the same age with only average good looks).

She read to us from her newly published collection of stories, No One Belongs Here More Than You, looking lovely and only a bit slouchy, throwing in self-deprecating jokes now and again. The stories she read were funny and honest and slightly surreal, the characters lonely and often self-defeating but also quirky and unapologetic and brave. She had the audience in her pocket and simultaneously eating out of her hand, if that’s possible.

A few weeks ago I finally broke down and bought the book (I was trying to hold out for the paperback, but what the heck). I read the whole thing in about a day. I was surprised to find that a lot of the stories are quite sexual, and not necessarily in a charming way. I don’t know what to think about all that sex, Miranda. It’s true, Me, You and Everyone We Know had some weird sex stuff in it, but somehow it came across as more cute than disturbing. This stuff was darker, less easy to laugh off.

I didn’t love every story, which was a surprising and also relieving. But I loved most of them. I even read some of them twice. How does she think this stuff up, I wondered? I still haven’t figured it out.

One noteworthy thing about Miranda’s characters is that they don’t have any friends, or, in the case of “The Man on the Stairs,” they have friends but don’t like them. This is nice for the reader, who can either relate (I don’t have any friends either!) or feel more popular in comparison (I have at least 2 friends! And I even like one of them!).

I of course tried to find Miranda in every narrator, no matter how unlikely. Does she fantasize about Prince Williams? Is she agoraphobic? Was she a fat woman in a former life? Had she once taught three elderly people to swim in her living room? It all seems possible.

And here lies the magic: these stories are utterly implausible and yet incredibly real. So we will forgive you, Miranda, for being so damn clever and charming, and sexually deviant as well. In a way, reading these stories gives us, if not a means of revenge, at least a sense of solace in “having to live on this planet, day after day, alone.”